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The Big City – Best Jazz Albums 2015

This list is built around the bal­lot I sent to Fran­cis Davis for his 10th Jazz Critic’s Poll, which should be posted at NPR by the mid­dle of Decem­ber. As some­one who grew up read­ing and admir­ing (and learn­ing a good deal about think­ing and writ­ing from) Davis’ crit­i­cism, I’m always thrilled to be a part of this.

There’s only one hard and fast thing about this list—I feel Epi­cen­ter, from Chris Lightcap’s Big­mouth, is absolutely the best jazz album of the year, and have thought that since my first lis­ten. The rest can change from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute …

This bal­lot is always frus­trat­ing to fill out. I lis­tened to around 200 jazz record­ings that were released in 2015, and that num­ber is only a (sub­stan­tial) por­tion of the total jazz record­ings that came out this year. And the flow never stops, there are record­ings that are com­ing out every week (like the new Kneedelus album and Robin Eubanks’ big band record) that due to the lim­its of time and a hard dead­line, I sim­ply can­not lis­ten to prior to mak­ing this list (I’ll get to them eventually).

When I pick what I feel are the year’s best record­ings, it’s a gut reac­tion. I’ve been doing the crit­i­cal lis­ten­ing thing for long enough now that I trust my ears to tell me if some­thing suc­ceeds, then later I can go back and ana­lyze the why, what, and how of it. The best music to me is the music that feels com­pletely sat­is­fy­ing, and I take things on their own terms, so play­ing free can be as sat­is­fy­ing as play­ing a stan­dard. There are more than ten records that were com­pletely sat­is­fy­ing to me this year, but this list is lim­ited to “10 Best New Releases,” so my choices are both arbi­trary and cal­cu­lated: I’ve tried to spread it across styles within a broad def­i­n­i­tion of jazz as a genre, and in some cases it’s been a bit of a coin toss to fit the album on the list. Please note that my picks for vocal, debut, and latin jazz albums are all excel­lent and belong in the top ten.

I’ve aug­mented this with addi­tional titles that will not count in this poll. Every­thing you see under “The Elevens” are all wor­thy of top ten inclu­sion, I just ran out of chairs. Below that is the hon­or­able men­tion cat­e­gory, which is record­ings that are packed full of excel­lent music but just don’t quite work as com­plete albums; often the issue is that they’re just too long, e.g. sev­enty min­utes when fifty-five would have been ideal. Since that’s an album issue, less a musi­cal one, I’ve put them in that cat­e­gory. They are rec­om­mended nonethe­less, and your mileage will surely vary.

Now, a cou­ple argu­ments. Kamasi Washington’s The Epic and the A Love Supreme: The Com­plete Mas­ters are likely going to come up big this year, at least from what I see from the Jazz Jour­nal­ists Asso­ci­a­tion chat­ter (I am not cur­rently a mem­ber because I remain unem­ployed and can­not afford the annual dues). I have reser­va­tions about both:

The Epic is played and pro­duced to the nth degree, a com­plete plea­sure to lis­ten to and ful­fill­ing through­out it’s entire dura­tion. It’s also a still­born recre­ation of an era that passed over forty years ago. Jazz has moved on quite far from the Coltrane/modal/spiritual era, and crit­i­cally I can never rec­om­mend his­tor­i­cal recre­ations (re-imagining and re-contextualization are another mat­ter) when there is so much fine jazz being made that reflects the present and pushes into the future. For a more detailed argu­ment, I rec­om­mend you read Ryan Meehan’s review which we pub­lished in the Rail.

It is no crit­i­cism of John Coltrane nor of A Love Supreme to say that the Com­plete Mas­ters release is dis­ap­point­ing and unessen­tial. The only mean­ing­ful dif­fer­ence between this and the 2002 Deluxe Edi­tion are sev­eral alter­nate tracks that show Coltrane ini­tially thought of the work as a sex­tet, with Archie Shepp and Richard Davis in the group. Those show the idea was unwork­able, that it moved the music towards absolute music when the goal was Coltrane’s per­sonal spir­i­tual expres­sion: Shepp and Davis just don’t get what’s going on. It’s musi­co­log­i­cally inter­est­ing to see that detail, but it’s a dis­trac­tion from the actual music and the album, and in my opin­ion did not merit rere­lease. I detect the cyn­i­cal whiff of prof­i­teer­ing, and I’m sorry I spent what lit­tle money I have on it.